Intangibilities Of Form

Many people who look at art decry it for the lack of craft skill in its production, whether it be painting, photography or sculpture. This work sheds light on this obsolescence of traditional craft skills in contemporary art, exploring the technological and social developments that gave rise to those postmodern theories. In this intellectually wide-ranging book John Roberts develops a labor theory of culture as a model for explaining the dynamics of avant-garde art and the expansion of artistic authority in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Duchamp to Warhol, conceptual art, and the "post-visual" practices of the moment, Roberts explores the relationship between artistic labor and productive labor, and the limits and possibilities of authorship. In doing so, he confronts a recurring theme of both conservative and radical detractors of modern art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: how is skill, and the seeming absence of skill in modern art, to be theorized and evaluated? Drawing on cognitive psychology, labor process theory, social anthropology, and debates in contemporary political philosophy, Roberts' book establishes a new critical topography for examining the cultural form of art today.